I'm afraid of Virginia Woolf!

I mean, Jesus, what is that even supposed to mean???

I just saw The Tree of Life and I'm not afraid to admit that I didn't know what the bloody hell was going on. Sometimes I do wonder if it is one of those films that ridicule the stupidity of the average viewer (like yours truly) by showing random images that are supposed to be poignant and deep but really it's just a dark attic that nobody ever remembers cleaning, the point of such movies, I feel like, is to make viewers who don't understand it say things like 'oh, how wonderfully symbolic the film was. It touched the core of my heart so!' while the writer sit back and laugh with great joy. Which is probably not the case at all, I'm most likely just really slow and dumb.

The thing is, I knew it was going to take a little thinking so I knew it was going to require re-watching but around halfway through the movie I got so sleepy that I couldn't see myself watching it again until a few weeks have passed. So no, I'm not afraid to admit that I'm not one of the higher class of society with impeccable taste and intellectual degree, I'm not afraid of saying that I'm afraid of Virginia Woolf --and Terrence Malick for that matter!

But here's what I'm not going to do, I'm not going to liken it to the naked emperor, I'm not going to boo at how it's taken hours of my life that I'll never get back, and I'm not going to regret having seen it because it was a visually stunning experience. Every single scene was executed perfectly, it was beautiful, what can I say? I don't have to understand what's going on but if I can enjoy the simplicity of its beauty then why not? Having said that, I will give it another go because it seems that many people suggests multiple viewings. Maybe the next time I see it I'll finally get why, if the movie was set in the 50s and present time, Sean Penn doesn't look like a 70 year-old man.